Accused killer Henry Lee Jones on slow path to judgment

Ken Walker of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., holds a photograph of his friend and employee, Keith Gross, believed to have been slain by Henry Lee Jones in 2002.

Hans Deryk/Special to The Commercial Appeal

State prosecutors are carefully building a case against Jones, hoping to use evidence from two Florida murders to convict him of killing Clarence and Lillian James of Bartlett in 2003.

Alan Spearman/The Commercial Appeal files

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. -- Six years have passed since Ken Walker found his friend's body. Keith Gross was naked and hogtied. His throat had been slashed.

"That's the last image I have of him and it's driving me nuts," Walker says. "I can't get it out."

The murder of 24-year-old Gross is the earliest killing linked to Henry Lee Jones, an alleged serial killer awaiting trial in Memphis on charges he slaughtered Clarence and Lillian James, an elderly couple in Bartlett, in 2003.

As the trial approaches, one central question looms over the case: Could their deaths have been prevented had police in Florida listened to Walker six years ago?

It was Monday, Sept. 9, 2002. According to a reconstruction of events based on police records and interviews, Walker arrived at Kitchens to Go, his custom kitchens showroom and store in Fort Lauderdale, as he always did. But this morning was different. Gross, always the first to arrive, was late to work.

Anxious, Walker called Gross. No answer. By noon, Walker was concerned.

"I'm going over to Keith's," he told his other employees.

Gross had followed his older brother, Michael, from New York to Florida and rented a small house a few blocks from Kitchens to Go. He lived paycheck to paycheck and was having trouble keeping up with his bills, including the utilities. That's why, as Walker approached the house, the noise seemed strange. The air conditioner -- which Gross had said he was trying not to use -- was buzzing loudly.

Walker knocked on the front door. No one answered. He then walked around to the back of the house, near the bedroom, where another window-unit air conditioner droned. He pushed his face to the bedroom window and through a small opening in the mini-blinds, Walker saw his friend on the floor.

"I was a sergeant in the Marine Corps. I've seen a lot of things in life," Walker says. "But this, it's imbedded in my head."

He rushed back to Kitchens to Go.

"There's something wrong with Keith," he told his other employees. "Call the police."

Walker and Michael Gross told investigators they didn't know of anyone who would want to kill Keith. But both had suspicions about one man -- a guy with dreadlocks and a teardrop tattooed below his left eye.

"He said his name was Bam," Michael Gross told police.

* * *

Bam was the nickname for Henry Lee Jones, a then-39-year-old drifter who had been in and out of jail his entire adult life.

At 19, following an incident in which he forced a Fort Lauderdale car salesman into the trunk of a Grand Prix at gunpoint, Jones was convicted of robbery, kidnapping, grand theft, possession of a firearm while engaged in a felony and carrying a concealed firearm -- charges that should have sent him to jail for 35 years. But owing to Florida's overcrowded prison system at the time, Jones received early release in 1997, despite continued violence while in state custody.

From his release to Gross' murder in 2002, Jones was arrested at least six times, including for stalking and battery, but for various reasons, he received no more than brief jail sentences. Records show that Jones' violence escalated while at the same time his behavior became more sexual. In fact, four months before Gross' murder, Jones was arrested for raping a mentally handicapped boy in Fort Lauderdale. Prosecutors dropped the rape charge following concerns they would not prevail at trial.

For his part, Walker didn't know about any of these crimes when he met Jones in 2002. It was in July of that year, and Gross came to Walker's house to borrow $20. He brought with him a new friend named Bam.

Walker immediately didn't like Bam.

"Don't ever bring that guy to my house again," he told Gross.

"Is it a black thing?" Gross replied. "You're black, too, you know."

"There's something about him," Walker explained.

Gross' brother had a similar encounter. Jones came over one day when Keith and Michael Gross were together. Michael told his brother to be careful of the guy named Bam.

But following Gross' murder, Fort Lauderdale police were not as suspicious of Jones. They questioned and cleared him.

"About that guy Bam, what did you find out?" Walker remembers asking Det. Mark Shotwell during the homicide investigation.

"That was Keith's friend," Shotwell answered.

Shotwell, who referred interview requests to a spokesman unable to discuss the case, had his own theory: The killer was someone active in Broward County's gay community.

"We are looking for leads and asking the gay community to help if they have any information," Shotwell commented to The Express, a weekly gay newspaper in South Florida.

The theory of a gay killer -- based in part on the fact that the heterosexual Gross was raped -- seemed to exclude Jones. By outside appearances, Jones wasn't gay. He had a girlfriend and a baby. (It's unclear whether Shotwell was aware at the time of the rape allegation against Jones; the investigative file is still under seal.)

Yet despite his theory, Shotwell remained suspicious of the heterosexual Walker, the friend and boss who found Gross' body. Shotwell interrogated the businessman seven times and examined computer files and e-mail at Kitchens to Go.

"I felt a great loss when they were looking at me as possibly having hurt Keith," Walker says.

For nearly a year, the Fort Lauderdale homicide investigation was active. No arrests were made.

Then, police believe, Jones killed again.

* * *

Tevarus Young was in Jones' Dodge Aries when he awoke to a knocking sound on the window. He was in Shelby County, and a Burger King employee was outside the car looking for Bam.

It was Aug. 22, 2003. Jones had picked up Young -- a 20-year-old who went by the nickname T-Rex and was wanted by police for allegedly trying to firebomb his girlfriend's house -- a few days before in a Fort Lauderdale park. He offered Young $20 for oral sex, and what was supposed to be a quick encounter turned into a 1,000-mile trip from Florida to Shelby County, where Jones had told Young he had family.

Young found Jones inside the Burger King, and together they drove to an apartment complex in Bartlett. Young said he didn't know where they were going. Across Bartlett Boulevard, Jones saw a house with the garage door up. An old man was sitting inside. Jones walked over as Young followed.

"Hey, pops, how you doing?" Young remembered Jones asking the man.

"Doing fine," answered Clarence James, an 82-year-old World War II veteran who retired from the Memphis Park Commission.

Young agreed to take James' lawnmower into the backyard, and when he returned, the garage door was down. Young walked into the house and found Jones carrying a rope and towel in his hands. He saw the man throw 64-year-old Lillian, Clarence James' wife, to the floor. She screamed.

"Old lady, do you know what time it is?" Young heard Jones say.

A few minutes later, Clarence and Lillian James were dead. They were bound and their throats slashed, just like Gross.

Left inside the house was a cup from Burger King.

The next day, Lillian's daughter, Margaret Coleman, drove to the Bartlett home after her mother hadn't returned calls. As soon as she entered the house, Coleman knew something was wrong. She could see a pair of scissors and trash on the floor.

"My mother is a very clean person," Coleman said at the time. "She don't want nothing on their floor."

At the time, the double murder was the first homicide in Bartlett in more than five years. In fact, since the deaths of Clarence and Lillian James in 2003, the only murder cases in Bartlett have been domestic.

"This was one of the only cases -- maybe the only case -- that I recall where an outside party, unknown to the family, came in and killed somebody," says Mayor Keith McDonald.

The crime, says McDonald, still haunts the suburban city of more than 47,000, where Clarence and Lillian James were liked.

"I'm not sure anybody is sure why it happened," McDonald says. "It's always been surmised that they took advantage of Clarence's friendliness. If someone asked to use the phone, he'd invite that person inside."

* * *

By the time police discovered the Bartlett murders, Jones was headed south.

On Aug. 25, 2003, Young, fearful of Jones, began to drive erratically on Interstate 95 in Brevard County, Fla. He was pulled over by police and arrested following the discovery of his warrant.

Jones, meanwhile, continued south.

The next day, he met 19-year-old Carlos Perez at Dependable Temps, an employment agency in Fort Lauderdale. The pair drove together to Melbourne, where Perez's body was later found on the bed of a hotel room. He had been raped and murdered. His hands and feet had been bound and his throat was slashed.

Police in Florida and Tennessee soon realized they might be looking for the same killer. They interviewed Young in jail and received enough information to charge Jones with two counts of murder in Memphis.

Forensic evidence linked Jones to the crime scenes in Bartlett and Melbourne and investigators in Fort Lauderdale also discovered the man's footprint matched bloody toeprints left inside Gross' home.

A fugitive-hunter apprehended Jones in Fort Lauderdale on Sept. 17, 2003, and he was extradited to Tennessee.

At the time, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement said Jones may be responsible for other murders throughout the Southeast. However, he has not been charged with or linked to any other murders but the four.

* * *

Little about Jones' case has been normal. Following a series of delays, Jones has waited more than five years at 201 Poplar to be tried for the murders of Clarence and Lillian James.

Most of the delays result from a request by the Shelby County District Attorney's Office to enter the killings of Gross and Perez into evidence in the Tennessee trial -- even though Jones has not been charged with either of the Florida murders.

While an unusual move, the prosecution's request is not without precedent in Tennessee. In 1950, the Tennessee Supreme Court ruled unanimously, in Harris v. State, that a woman was allowed to testify that she had been raped by L.J. Harris in Memphis one week before the man raped another woman, the only crime for which he was charged. The evidence could be used, the Supreme Court ruled, because it helped to establish the identity of the person who committed the crime in question.

On Aug. 29, Shelby County Criminal Court Judge John Colton Jr. ruled that prosecutors may be able to enter evidence of the Perez murder during the Memphis trial. Colton declined, however, to allow in evidence from Gross' murder in 2002, saying the killing was "too remote in time" to be relevant to the murder of the Jameses.

Colton's decision was difficult to accept for Walker in Fort Lauderdale. He says he knows police bungled the investigation of Gross' murder, and for that reason, he's not hopeful Jones will ever be convicted of killing his friend. He just wants it on record, something official. He wants a court somewhere to say what he believes: that Jones killed Gross, and had police in Fort Lauderdale not so quickly dismissed him as a suspect, the Jameses and Perez would be alive today.

"Keith didn't deserve to die," Walker says. "Carlos Perez, he didn't deserve to die. The Jameses -- none of them deserved to die. But here's the thing: Bam should have been caught after Keith's murder.

"All I want is justice, death and an indictment," Walker continues. "I want him to get the death penalty in Tennessee for the Jameses, and I want him to be indicted for Keith's murder in Florida. That's what I want."

But Walker, having already waited six years, will likely have to wait even longer.